That's what I was thinking. It's so ridiculously luxurious that nobody's ever heard of it. This reminds me of the coffee that comes from beans with have been through the digestive system of a civet. Paying absurd prices for stuff that isn't even better than the cheaper stuff.
But while OpenOffice is good, I wouldn't quite go so far as to say that it's as good as MS Office. It does have it's shortcomings. While I use it at home, I wouldn't argue for a moment that it's a completely replacement for MS Office.
That really depends on how you define algebra and calculus. When I was in university, I did quite well at linear algebra, but didn't do as well at calculus. I also knew a lot of people who had the exact opposite problem. For some people, certain skills are just easy to pick up, for other people, it will be completely different skill. Though I agree with you that it's a false dichotomy. People who aren't able to do basic arithmetic won't be very good at doing calculus.
But junky food isn't even cheaper. Drinking pop might be cheaper than drinking fruit juice, but do you know what's even cheaper? Tap Water! I really don't get why there is such a big relation between eating unhealthy food and low incomes. It's almost as if their income isn't low enough, or they aren't educated to know which is really cheaper. Sure mechanically separated chicken nuggets aren't cheaper than boneless skinless chicken breasts, but they come out to quite a bit more than a whole chicken, of if you're feeling really cheap, chicken thighs.
Most of the CS profs aren't really programmers, but true computers scientists, and really computer science has very little to do with computers, or programming. Also, most of the professors have probably been around for a long time, and know what works and what doesn't work. They want you to hand in hard copies of stuff so that they don't have to deal with any excuses about how the system lost your assignment. The only problem I would really have with handing in hard copies is that nobody uses floppies anymore, which is what I used to hand in my assignments on, and USB sticks and SD cards are a little too expensive to be passing around to teachers for assignments. They really should make Low capacity SD cards for really cheap so that people can us them for passing data around in cases where you might not get the SD card back.
It's odd, but they only seem to be targeting the small ISPs. First Teksavvy, and now Distributel. It's odd that they aren't going after Bell or Rogers. Either they figure the little guys won't have the money to hire lawyers to fight (Teksavvy didn't) or there's something more nefarious going on. My theory is that they are in kahootz with the big ISPs who paid them off to either keep quiet, or payed them off to go after the little guys to scare people away from using smaller ISPs.
Sure you can't resell them, but they also never wear out, and they take up a lot less space on your bookshelf, and it can be ordered right from you ebook reader and delivered to you instantly. You don't have to worry about the book store not carrying a new release book because the author isn't popular enough, or worry about them running out of copies. Personally, if I had a choice of an e-book and a paper book for the same price, I would choose the eBook most of the time. It's just more convenient, and wastes less resources.
I don't think that eBooks really should cost much less than print book. Most of the money goes to the author and publisher. Very little money goes into paying for shipping/warehousing/printing a physical book. You can go down to your local dollar store and pick up novels/bibles there for $1 a piece. And they are probably only buying them off the supplier for 30-50 cents a piece. I wouldn't be surprised if the overhead costs were pretty much the same for print and e-books. I'm actually pretty satisfied with the price of books lately. It wasn't long ago that a new hardcover could be $30-$40. Now you can usually get them for about $10-15 if you go to Amazon or other large online book stores.
I know a guy who does this. He pulls in about $50 a month with a site that basically runs itself. The only reason I don't do it is because the "ads" he ends up generating money off of are the kind that pay out when the visitor to his site installs a tool bar or some other nefarious thing. The only reason I wouldn't do that is that I don't think it's ethically correct to lure people into installing stuff they don't want on their computer. But I imagine that someone who's ambitious enough, and who sets up enough sites could generate quite a bit of money like this.
Not to mention figuring out shipping costs in the first place. The shipper charges you based on the size of the box and the weight of the box. If you don't know the size of the box, you can't give an accurate shipping amount. So you oversize all your boxes to make sure you don't lose money on the shipping.
If Google can provide an App for my phone that provides the second factor (Google Authenticator), then any other company should be able to do the same. Offer a separate "dongle" for anybody who doesn't have a smart phone and you are set. You could probably make a dongle that supported giving out keys for multiple sites. So instead of having a separate dongle for each service you subscribe to, you have a single dongle which can give out different keys for all services. This would probably work much like and Android phone, that could support many apps for 2 factor authentication, but could be much cheaper and simpler than a phone.
I second this. C# is a great language. There's a large community of programmers, the tools are free, the documentation is superb. Also, it's something that's used in industry which is always a plus. It's also extremely simple to get up and running. You can program console applications, GUI applications, web applications, and even games. Speaking of web applications, you can develop an entire web application without having to have any idea how to set up a web server. There's a lot of libraries built in so that you can do a whole bunch of stuff without going to look for third party libraries. It's really a great language to work in.
Also, what's important, is how much profit you make from selling PCs (or tablets or whatever). I think that Apple probably has them all beat in that respect. Sure HP, Acer and others may sell more units, or bring in more revenue, but their profit margins are razor thin. Apple on the other hand has huge profits. It doesn't matter if you count tablets as PCs or not, because Apple is the only one making serious profits selling computing devices to end users.
Actually, according to this map, quite a bit of people, but perhaps not "the vast majority" live in the tropics or near the sea. Just because it's not a problem in America, or Europe, doesn't mean that this isn't a problem for a substantial number of people.
100 years ago this made more sense, when sending a letter was often the only way to get the message to someone. Without affordable mail, you might be cut off from civilization. But you can send a lot of stuff electronically now (money, letters, etc). So there isn't really much of a need for people to send stuff for such a low price. 90% of the mail I receive is junk mail anyway. Which is basically the only way the postal system is able to maintain a business at all. If they had to support themselves on just letter mail and packages, they'd have no chance of staying in business.
Do what they do in Canada. Place your "Post-Office" inside a pharmacy, and staff it as long as the pharmacy is open (usually pretty late). The staff of the post office is actually the staff of the pharmacy, who can do things like stock shelves during the times when nobody needs the post office services. The post office pays the pharmacy to run the service, but still saves a bunch of money, because they don't have to rent their own space, and pay employees full time when most of the time there's nothing for them to do.
From what I've heard, In Canada, they're entertaining the idea of delivering mail every other day. So it would be Monday, Wednesday, Friday on week, and then Tuesday, Thursday the next week. That would be fine for me as well. The only thing of interest I get in my mail is bills, and that can usually wait an extra day. The pay-by date is usually a couple weeks in advance. I usually only pick up my mail a couple times a week anyway, since they don't deliver your my house, but actually leave it at the "community mail box", which I actually like better then having it left in my mail box. Way more secure.
While Postgres may be a better database, it's not a great idea to use Postgres as the only option if you want other people to run your project on their own systems. Because many hosts simply don't have Postgres as an option. It's not "that hard" when you're starting a new project to make it database agnostic, or support a few of the more popular databases. I don't know why more projects aren't database agnostic.
Without much analysis done on the actual output, this is a very relevant statement. It's happened in the past that certain drivers have claimed better performance while at the same time completely ignoring certain things they were supposed to be doing in order to get the framerate up. Do the frames end up looking exactly the same with both drivers? What exactly is making it faster. Did they improve a specific part which only helps for Q3A demo files and doesn't actually make any difference when playing a real game.
Also, at $659 for their cheapest laptop, it sure feels like there's some kind of tax on there. For the same price you could get a much better machine from any of the other guys (HP, Acer, Toshiba, etc.) Plus they have plenty of selection at lower prices if you don't want to spend as much.
Ultraportables require too much customization for the small market that System76 can reach. If you've ever looked at the innards of the Mac Book Air, you'll notice that just about everything is custom, including, and especially, the battery. Larger laptops just use a bunch of standard cells in a custom plastic covering. But you can't do that with ultraportables because the standard cells are too thick. If they could do it, they'd basically be taking a Lenovo ultrabook, and putting Linux and their own badge on it. But then I doubt they'd be able to do so for a better price than what Lenovo can offer for the exact same hardware.
People jumped down Napster's throat because it didn't have substantial non-infringing uses. FTP, web browsers, Google, and other such technologies you and other commenters mention, have substantial non-infringing use. However Napster had basically one purpose. That was to distribute MP3 files around the internet, and in 99.99% of cases these files were being distributed without the consent of the copyright holder.
Yeah, I never really thought about it like that, but it's probably one of the reasons it won't work that well. Most people willing to pay monthly to play games probably will want to play multiple hours a day. Which means that they'll be usually a large portion of the machine's resources. Very few people are going to play a monthly fee and then only play games for a couple hours a week.
Not just bandwidth, but ping time. Ping times are a big enough problem when the controls show the results in real time on your screen but it gets updated a little later on the screen of the guy you're playing against. But with the way OnLive works, your controls have to to the server and then back to you before the image updates on your screen. Certain types of high-twitch games will completely not work in this environment. But the kinds of games that won't work on this environment are exactly the type of game where fast reflexes matter. It doesn't matter how long it takes the graphics to render for chess, but then again the graphics for chess aren't that complicated (or don't need to be). However, a game like a fast paced first person shooter or driving game needs the graphics rendered right away, but these are the games where the graphics are usually more complicated.
I agree with this. I switched to a no-contract carrier a couple years ago, and I couldn't be happier. Sure I pay a little more for my phone up front, but I save quite a bit on my monthly bill. On my old carrier, I was paying over $50 a month, which didn't even include any data. Now I'm paying $30 a month for unlimited text, local calls, and data (slowed down after 5GB). At $20 savings a month the phone was paid for before the end of the first year. Plus if my phone breaks, I have the option of just buying a cheap phone to replace it. Carriers have way too much power over subsribers when they are in contracts. They should be illegal. People should pay for their phone up front and be able to switch phones or carriers at any time without incurring a charge.
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That's what I was thinking. It's so ridiculously luxurious that nobody's ever heard of it. This reminds me of the coffee that comes from beans with have been through the digestive system of a civet. Paying absurd prices for stuff that isn't even better than the cheaper stuff.
But while OpenOffice is good, I wouldn't quite go so far as to say that it's as good as MS Office. It does have it's shortcomings. While I use it at home, I wouldn't argue for a moment that it's a completely replacement for MS Office.
That really depends on how you define algebra and calculus. When I was in university, I did quite well at linear algebra, but didn't do as well at calculus. I also knew a lot of people who had the exact opposite problem. For some people, certain skills are just easy to pick up, for other people, it will be completely different skill. Though I agree with you that it's a false dichotomy. People who aren't able to do basic arithmetic won't be very good at doing calculus.
But junky food isn't even cheaper. Drinking pop might be cheaper than drinking fruit juice, but do you know what's even cheaper? Tap Water! I really don't get why there is such a big relation between eating unhealthy food and low incomes. It's almost as if their income isn't low enough, or they aren't educated to know which is really cheaper. Sure mechanically separated chicken nuggets aren't cheaper than boneless skinless chicken breasts, but they come out to quite a bit more than a whole chicken, of if you're feeling really cheap, chicken thighs.
Most of the CS profs aren't really programmers, but true computers scientists, and really computer science has very little to do with computers, or programming. Also, most of the professors have probably been around for a long time, and know what works and what doesn't work. They want you to hand in hard copies of stuff so that they don't have to deal with any excuses about how the system lost your assignment. The only problem I would really have with handing in hard copies is that nobody uses floppies anymore, which is what I used to hand in my assignments on, and USB sticks and SD cards are a little too expensive to be passing around to teachers for assignments. They really should make Low capacity SD cards for really cheap so that people can us them for passing data around in cases where you might not get the SD card back.
It's odd, but they only seem to be targeting the small ISPs. First Teksavvy, and now Distributel. It's odd that they aren't going after Bell or Rogers. Either they figure the little guys won't have the money to hire lawyers to fight (Teksavvy didn't) or there's something more nefarious going on. My theory is that they are in kahootz with the big ISPs who paid them off to either keep quiet, or payed them off to go after the little guys to scare people away from using smaller ISPs.
Sure you can't resell them, but they also never wear out, and they take up a lot less space on your bookshelf, and it can be ordered right from you ebook reader and delivered to you instantly. You don't have to worry about the book store not carrying a new release book because the author isn't popular enough, or worry about them running out of copies. Personally, if I had a choice of an e-book and a paper book for the same price, I would choose the eBook most of the time. It's just more convenient, and wastes less resources.
I don't think that eBooks really should cost much less than print book. Most of the money goes to the author and publisher. Very little money goes into paying for shipping/warehousing/printing a physical book. You can go down to your local dollar store and pick up novels/bibles there for $1 a piece. And they are probably only buying them off the supplier for 30-50 cents a piece. I wouldn't be surprised if the overhead costs were pretty much the same for print and e-books. I'm actually pretty satisfied with the price of books lately. It wasn't long ago that a new hardcover could be $30-$40. Now you can usually get them for about $10-15 if you go to Amazon or other large online book stores.
I know a guy who does this. He pulls in about $50 a month with a site that basically runs itself. The only reason I don't do it is because the "ads" he ends up generating money off of are the kind that pay out when the visitor to his site installs a tool bar or some other nefarious thing. The only reason I wouldn't do that is that I don't think it's ethically correct to lure people into installing stuff they don't want on their computer. But I imagine that someone who's ambitious enough, and who sets up enough sites could generate quite a bit of money like this.
Not to mention figuring out shipping costs in the first place. The shipper charges you based on the size of the box and the weight of the box. If you don't know the size of the box, you can't give an accurate shipping amount. So you oversize all your boxes to make sure you don't lose money on the shipping.
If Google can provide an App for my phone that provides the second factor (Google Authenticator), then any other company should be able to do the same. Offer a separate "dongle" for anybody who doesn't have a smart phone and you are set. You could probably make a dongle that supported giving out keys for multiple sites. So instead of having a separate dongle for each service you subscribe to, you have a single dongle which can give out different keys for all services. This would probably work much like and Android phone, that could support many apps for 2 factor authentication, but could be much cheaper and simpler than a phone.
I second this. C# is a great language. There's a large community of programmers, the tools are free, the documentation is superb. Also, it's something that's used in industry which is always a plus. It's also extremely simple to get up and running. You can program console applications, GUI applications, web applications, and even games. Speaking of web applications, you can develop an entire web application without having to have any idea how to set up a web server. There's a lot of libraries built in so that you can do a whole bunch of stuff without going to look for third party libraries. It's really a great language to work in.
Also, what's important, is how much profit you make from selling PCs (or tablets or whatever). I think that Apple probably has them all beat in that respect. Sure HP, Acer and others may sell more units, or bring in more revenue, but their profit margins are razor thin. Apple on the other hand has huge profits. It doesn't matter if you count tablets as PCs or not, because Apple is the only one making serious profits selling computing devices to end users.
Actually, according to this map, quite a bit of people, but perhaps not "the vast majority" live in the tropics or near the sea. Just because it's not a problem in America, or Europe, doesn't mean that this isn't a problem for a substantial number of people.
100 years ago this made more sense, when sending a letter was often the only way to get the message to someone. Without affordable mail, you might be cut off from civilization. But you can send a lot of stuff electronically now (money, letters, etc). So there isn't really much of a need for people to send stuff for such a low price. 90% of the mail I receive is junk mail anyway. Which is basically the only way the postal system is able to maintain a business at all. If they had to support themselves on just letter mail and packages, they'd have no chance of staying in business.
Do what they do in Canada. Place your "Post-Office" inside a pharmacy, and staff it as long as the pharmacy is open (usually pretty late). The staff of the post office is actually the staff of the pharmacy, who can do things like stock shelves during the times when nobody needs the post office services. The post office pays the pharmacy to run the service, but still saves a bunch of money, because they don't have to rent their own space, and pay employees full time when most of the time there's nothing for them to do.
From what I've heard, In Canada, they're entertaining the idea of delivering mail every other day. So it would be Monday, Wednesday, Friday on week, and then Tuesday, Thursday the next week. That would be fine for me as well. The only thing of interest I get in my mail is bills, and that can usually wait an extra day. The pay-by date is usually a couple weeks in advance. I usually only pick up my mail a couple times a week anyway, since they don't deliver your my house, but actually leave it at the "community mail box", which I actually like better then having it left in my mail box. Way more secure.
While Postgres may be a better database, it's not a great idea to use Postgres as the only option if you want other people to run your project on their own systems. Because many hosts simply don't have Postgres as an option. It's not "that hard" when you're starting a new project to make it database agnostic, or support a few of the more popular databases. I don't know why more projects aren't database agnostic.
Without much analysis done on the actual output, this is a very relevant statement. It's happened in the past that certain drivers have claimed better performance while at the same time completely ignoring certain things they were supposed to be doing in order to get the framerate up. Do the frames end up looking exactly the same with both drivers? What exactly is making it faster. Did they improve a specific part which only helps for Q3A demo files and doesn't actually make any difference when playing a real game.
Also, at $659 for their cheapest laptop, it sure feels like there's some kind of tax on there. For the same price you could get a much better machine from any of the other guys (HP, Acer, Toshiba, etc.) Plus they have plenty of selection at lower prices if you don't want to spend as much.
Ultraportables require too much customization for the small market that System76 can reach. If you've ever looked at the innards of the Mac Book Air, you'll notice that just about everything is custom, including, and especially, the battery. Larger laptops just use a bunch of standard cells in a custom plastic covering. But you can't do that with ultraportables because the standard cells are too thick. If they could do it, they'd basically be taking a Lenovo ultrabook, and putting Linux and their own badge on it. But then I doubt they'd be able to do so for a better price than what Lenovo can offer for the exact same hardware.
People jumped down Napster's throat because it didn't have substantial non-infringing uses. FTP, web browsers, Google, and other such technologies you and other commenters mention, have substantial non-infringing use. However Napster had basically one purpose. That was to distribute MP3 files around the internet, and in 99.99% of cases these files were being distributed without the consent of the copyright holder.
Yeah, I never really thought about it like that, but it's probably one of the reasons it won't work that well. Most people willing to pay monthly to play games probably will want to play multiple hours a day. Which means that they'll be usually a large portion of the machine's resources. Very few people are going to play a monthly fee and then only play games for a couple hours a week.
Not just bandwidth, but ping time. Ping times are a big enough problem when the controls show the results in real time on your screen but it gets updated a little later on the screen of the guy you're playing against. But with the way OnLive works, your controls have to to the server and then back to you before the image updates on your screen. Certain types of high-twitch games will completely not work in this environment. But the kinds of games that won't work on this environment are exactly the type of game where fast reflexes matter. It doesn't matter how long it takes the graphics to render for chess, but then again the graphics for chess aren't that complicated (or don't need to be). However, a game like a fast paced first person shooter or driving game needs the graphics rendered right away, but these are the games where the graphics are usually more complicated.
I agree with this. I switched to a no-contract carrier a couple years ago, and I couldn't be happier. Sure I pay a little more for my phone up front, but I save quite a bit on my monthly bill. On my old carrier, I was paying over $50 a month, which didn't even include any data. Now I'm paying $30 a month for unlimited text, local calls, and data (slowed down after 5GB). At $20 savings a month the phone was paid for before the end of the first year. Plus if my phone breaks, I have the option of just buying a cheap phone to replace it. Carriers have way too much power over subsribers when they are in contracts. They should be illegal. People should pay for their phone up front and be able to switch phones or carriers at any time without incurring a charge.